Touch screen technology has advanced in recent years such that touch screen technology can be found in many consumer level devices and applications. For example, banking machines often include touch sensitive graphical user interfaces that allow users to select a function and an amount for withdrawal or deposit. In another example, personal data assistants use touch screen technology to allow users to select graphical icons on an interactive interface with the user of a stylus. In still yet another example, some laptop computers are equipped with touch screen technology that allow users to generate signatures, select applications, and perform other tasks with the use of a stylus.
The popularity of touch screen technology has increased due to ease of use, particularly for novice computer users. For instance, novice computer users may find it more intuitive to select a graphical icon by hand than to select the icon through use of various menus and a pointing and clicking mechanism, such as a mouse. In currently available systems users can select, move, modify, or perform other tasks on objects that are visible on a display screen by selecting such objects (e.g., with a stylus or their finger).
While touch screen technology has greatly advanced, limitations persist, particularly in connection with touch-screen applications that are designed to be used on an irregular display surface, such as a spherical display surface. For example, conventionally, application developers must consider how graphics, text, and/or the like will appear on an irregular display surface when designing an application. Accordingly, to facilitate user-interaction with objects displayed on an irregular display surface, such developers generate code for all possible positions of graphical objects on the irregular display surface to ensure that such objects are displayed in a manner that is aesthetically pleasing. This requires a considerable amount of development time and also requires significant computational expense when projecting images onto a display. An alternative is to develop very limited applications with “canned” image data, such that a touch-screen apparatus has limited interactive functionality.